


dark come soon (I'm almost there)

by tomatocages (kittu9)



Category: Tangled (2010)
Genre: Child Abuse, Coming of Age, Community: femgenficathon, Education, Gen, Questions, Self-Discovery, Verbal Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-08
Updated: 2011-10-08
Packaged: 2017-10-24 09:57:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/262166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/tomatocages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rapunzel grew up in relative isolation, with a woman who brushed off every question at every turn. That didn't stop her from asking them.</p><p>Written for femgenficathon 2011.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dark come soon (I'm almost there)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Femgenficathon 2011, using Prompt 104: _Maybe I wanted to hear it so badly that my ears betrayed my mind in order to secure my heart._ \-- Margaret Cho (born December 5, 1968), Korean-American comedian, fashion designer, actress, author, recording artist and activist for LGBT rights.
> 
> Title from “Dark Come Soon,” by Tegan & Sara.

Well. If it hadn’t been one thing: it would have been another.

Even though Mother doesn’t encourage critical thinking, Rapunzel isn’t stupid. She knows she’s being groomed. Most of the time it felt like love, or something like it.

*

The older Rapunzel gets, the less Mother remains in the tower. It makes sense:  her room is small, the world is wide and dangerous, and Mother knows her way around and through the paths of darkness. Rapunzel has no doubts regarding her mother’s fierceness, drive, and will. Besides: hanging baskets aside, Rapunzel’s suspended garden doesn’t flourish enough to feed the two of them. She still can’t figure out how to grow parsnips, and the tower is too far above the trees to gather whatever they grow.

*

Mother teaches Rapunzel how to read, mostly so she can leave her notes— _Don’t forget to brush your hair! You don’t want rats to make a nest in it, my flower, because they’d eat up your pretty little ears_ —but eventually she starts bringing books to the tower. Never very many, and never very exciting ones, but Rapunzel loves them anyway. She rations the time she spends staring at the pages, traces the letters with her fingertips; she carefully sounds out the words she doesn’t know: _Bromeliad. Longitudinous. Suture._

A lot of the books are about plants and forests and creeping things, as if to illustrate how lovely, dark, and deep the world beyond the tower is; after a while, Rapunzel starts to draw sprawling vines on the lowest walls of her room, twining dusky streaks of pigment around the legs of her bed and mirror.

After Rapunzel has copied all of the pictures and is getting started on the topographical maps, the books disappear overnight. Mother says something about appreciating the things you have, and something else about cleaning up after yourself, which Rapunzel takes to mean that she didn’t shelve them properly after each use.

She’s not sure, but it does get awfully dusty in her room, and she’s still too small to really wield a broom with any effectiveness; maybe that’s why she can’t keep nice things.

*

Mother does bring her more books, after a time; but they are full of stories about girls who get eaten by wolves, and about ladies who stay at home and live happily ever after. In sort: they’re kind of boring, and the adventures, coupled with Mother’s shadow puppets, give her nightmares.

But she doesn’t have much else to do, and so she reads the stories a seventh, a thousandth, and millionth time: she thinks about what the characters do, and what she would do instead.

(In the worst story, a girl talks to the wolf and promptly forgets about him, and then he eats her and her grandmother up. Rapunzel thinks she would have kept him talking, asking question after question until the wolf got annoyed and stalked off, or until someone else came down the forest path. It’s a path, after all: the little girl couldn’t have been the only one to use it.)

*

She’s almost seven, and her hair has grown so long that she can wrap it all the way around herself (like Mother’s cloak, but brighter, or like the girl in that story, but not red) and still have enough left to trail behind her; sometimes, she uses the very ends of her hair as a paintbrush. When mother catches her at it—sometimes Rapunzel’s arms get tired before she reaches the end of her hair, and she doesn’t brush out _all_ of the pigment—she sighs, deeply. Rapunzel feels an instant coil of shame deep in her belly, and hangs her head so that her hair falls across her face. At the same time, she can feel tension in the nape of her neck from where Mother is still holding onto her hair.

“Rapunzel,” Mother says, and the reproach is _tangible_ (another word from another book; Rapunzel thinks it’s pronounced with a short _a_ and a soft _g_ , like the word _tangled_ ). “I know your hair isn’t as pretty as mine—teasing, pet—but there’s no need for you to color it.”

“I was painting,” Rapunzel says reluctantly. She probes an empty space in her jaw with her tongue; she lost another tooth last week.

“Don’t mumble, Rapunzel. It’s particularly unattractive.”

“I was painting,” she tries again. “My fingers didn’t make the lines right.” 

Mother pulls Rapunzel’s hair away from her face. Rapunzel is, as always, struck by how pale and sharp her mother’s face is, compared to Rapunzel’s own round pink one. “Rapunzel,” she croons, “ask and Mother will provide for you.”

Rapunzel feels even worse for her transgression: of course Mother would have given her a paintbrush, if Rapunzel had only thought to ask for it.

She actually doesn’t give her a paintbrush, after all that, and finally Rapunzel uses her sewing scissors to snip off a bit of the dull, brown hair at the nape of her neck. It works perfectly once she fastens it to a spoon handle.

*

Mother does not bring her any books about stars (it doesn't occur to Rapunzel that this is because not very many books like that exist, and the ones that do are locked up in places that Mother doesn't dare tread). But Rapunzel has a good mind and a skylight, and she starts leaving the windows open at night. Pascale stays up with her, sits on her shoulder and licks mosquitoes out of the night air with his long, sticky tongue. Rapunzel watches the way the world turns around her; when she's fifteen, she starts drawing the patterns on the walls. 

She'll never say this to anyone, unless perhaps she can find the words to tell Eugene, but the reason Rapunzel never thought about leaving her tower was that she spent so much more time thinking of things getting in. Once a bird had tried to nest in the rafters and Mother had gone after it with a basket; they'd had sparrow soup for dinner, and Rapunzel had wept into the broth.

Later, Mother had given her a necklace made from the eggs--she'd pricked them with pins and blown out the yolks, and the shells twirled on a cord she'd braided from stray hair caught in Rapunzel's hairbrush. Mother had pressed the egg-beads into Rapunzel's hands so fiercely that one shell cracked. (The interior fragments were still tacky with remnants of yolk.) 

“Hold tight, my flower!” Mother had laughed, ignoring the look on Rapunzel’s face. “Don’t let Mother’s present fly away!”

 She kept the eggs wrapped up in scraps from her baby clothes, tucked in the bottom of her empty jewelry box. Eventually, after Mother stopped laughing over the bird’s stupidity, Rapunzel buried the eggs in one of her potted plants.

* 

Rapunzel lives within a fixed point, and does not move; the sky whirls around her. At night she can see the stars; she traces their movement. (Sometimes she creeps out the skylight and perches anxiously on the sloped roof of the tower, her hair tied tightly around the spire and twisted through the crossbeams. She can see for miles and miles and miles.)

The moon spins around, winking in and out of sight, and Rapunzel wonders if it is hiding from something. She makes a chart of the moon’s disappearances; when she’s almost seventeen, she notices that its absence in the sky corresponds to her own monthly bleeding (which Mother assures her is normal, although she doesn’t seem happy about it. Well, Rapunzel isn’t too thrilled either). 

The moon-month chart makes her think harder about the rest of the night sky. She goes back to the star patterns she drew at fifteen, and draws them again; then she stares at them, and watches the sky, and sees the pattern: they move as well, with the seasons.

The lights on her birthday do not fit in with any of the patterns she discovers; even the odd, intermittent streaks of light across the sky (“ _Falling stars_ , Rapunzel, _honestly_ , you’re such a bumpkin—you know I love you, darling!”) are a different kind of light, a different type of movement.  The birthday lights lack any pattern whatsoever; they are dimmer in rain, they move faster in wind, the number is not constant.  Sometimes they flicker, like a candle placed in a draft.

Mother took away Rapunzel’s last notebook and hasn’t said anything about either giving it back or replacing it, so Rapunzel writes her observations on the wall, underneath her sky charts and behind a curtain. The curved stone holds the sky surprisingly well, and Rapunzel wonders if the heavens have a shape.  If the world has a shape, if it’s the world moving or the sky itself.

The questions burn more at seventeen than they did at seven, and Rapunzel feels an itch start inside her, one that makes her long to run to the window ledge and topple over the side of it, to _get out_. Maybe if she runs away just once, she can come back as if nothing has ever happened.

She starts counting down the days until her eighteenth birthday, to the floating lights, and thinks: this is it.

 


End file.
